7 Steps Guide To Social Media Marketing Strategy For Every Business

To truly reach your target niche audience, today, there is no better means than Social Media. Moreover, there is no better tool than Social Media Marketing. And creating a unique social media strategy will require a thorough step-by-step process with an outcome of your bespoke social media strategy.

From creating a succinct strategy to putting together a comprehensive plan, designing a marketing strategy personalized to your industry is one of the most intricate parts of social media strategy.

Follow through this 7-step guide and know how you can create your own social media strategy, in accordance with your business goals, products and services, and marketing goals. 

1. Start With a S.M.A.R.T. Strategy
2. Create an Object-specific Plan
3. Is Your Social Media Platform Relevant to the Business?
4. Far-flung Competitors’ Analysis
5. Curate Quality Content
6. Don’t Shy Away from Reevaluating and Adapting the Strategies
7. Have You Tried KPIs Yet?

1. Start With a S.M.A.R.T. Strategy

S.M.A.R.T. strategic approach is quite famous among social media marketers, and almost every other marketer performs S.M.A.R.T. analysis of their strategy. 

Before commencing a social media strategy, you need to make sure that your goal is,

Specific to the objective, Measurable in terms of performance, Attainable with practical social media purpose, Relevant to the business objective and the determined market, Time-bound with estimated deadlines and check-ins. In order to create a solid foundation of your strategy, make sure to weigh it on the S.M.A.R.T. barometer first.

2. Create An Object-specific Plan

All the Hows, Whys, Whats, Whens, and Wheres will be the key determining factors behind choosing your social media plan. Your goal must come with an objective. Creating a social media funnel plan is the most intricate part of the strategy. 

It is essential to identify the ultimate objective of your businesses’ social media strategy. Make sure to list the hierarchy of the factors pertinent to your business. Be it your, 

• Brand Awareness
• Sales Augmentation
• Increase Target Market Reach
• Online presence/ Visibility 
• Conversion and Engagement 

Prioritize these objectives as per your business requirements. Many companies also tend to forget the importance of the duration of the goal. Whether your social media marketing plan is for a short-run campaign, or long-envisioned goal—your strategy should determine a time frame to follow it. 

For instance, if you are a newbie in the market and want to gain traction fast, then your social media plan will be hugely dominated by brand awareness and reaching the relevant target market. Similarly, if a semi or well-established business needs to convert the present audience into increased leads and sales numbers, then making revenue and conversion, the primary objective of the strategy will be ideal. 

3. Is Your Social Media Platform Relevant to the Business?

Only Digital Marketers stress enough to choose the perfect social media platform for a product/service. A social media strategy does not work with a one size fit all agenda and needs fine-tuning with every new product/service company.

Simply put, promoting your law firm on Instagram or Snapchat will evidently have zero to low conversion rates. Whereas, creating a social media persona of a fashion, jewelry, or cosmetic-related product on Pinterest will work swimmingly as 72% of Pinterest users are Females. Therefore, a relevant social media site can effortlessly make or break your social media strategy in a jiffy. It would be best if you consider the magnitude of the gap in the potential and real prospects(consumers) of the site.

4. Far-flung Competitors’ Analysis

An in-depth competitors’ analysis is all about researching and interpreting the kind of path and strategy your competitors are applying. By conducting a profound competitors’ analysis, it gets easy to locate your target market and their behavior. Moreover, broad-gauge research and reports can also entail the way your potential customers react to an already operating social media strategy. Analyzing your competitors’ strategy will give you a head start before creating an engaging social media strategy.

Performing the traditional Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis will also enable you to get an insight into your product’s social outreach, potential market, gap analysis, etc. In recent times, Social Listening has also surfaced as one of the essential tools for companies where you can monitor, analyze, and take immediate actions to improve customer retention.

5. Curate Quality Content 

Compelling and engaging content will make your audience curious and might encourage them to take the next step in your social media strategy. It’s not just about texts here. Curating quality content includes optimum use of hashtags, using polls in user engagement, stories and timelines with trendy terms, ever more so as creating a meme (if your social media strategy falls under that permissive category). 

Content in Social Media works wonders if it’s made to stick the right chords with the audience. Letting your social media niche participate in your activities while making it relevant has the main requirement of every business today.

6. Don’t Shy Away from Reevaluation and Adaptation

Every strategy needs fine-tuning at some point. Your year-old social media strategy might not work today, the strategies you are practicing today will be inapplicable in the next year or so. This is how rapidly the market and user intent is changing. Refinement is the key. More so today, when every brand is creating a personalized yet distinguished social media engagement strategy. 

Before starting your social media business from scratch, make sure to lean on appealing, eye-catching, and trendy content, which can be seasonal as well as cornerstone.

7. Have You Tried KPIs Yet?

Digital Marketing KPI is practiced all around the industries. Whether you are a small business owner or a well-known brand, monitoring and measuring your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) has helped companies even to create new micro Digital marketing strategies within other strategies. 

Marketers focus extensively on monitoring and evaluating lead generation, paid advertising, Cost conversion, cost per lead generation, etc. A fitting KPI monitoring has helped companies search the market, tap on their ideal prospect, and eventually convert them into paying customers. Hence, the sooner you will start monitoring your lead, the more swiftly your social media strategy will fruit promising results.

In conclusion, following a stapled digital marketing strategy may help your business for a limited amount of time, but personalizing your plan while creating a highly targeted campaign will create an enhanced value altogether. 

So, whether your social media strategy is for long-term or short, paid or organic, organizational or channel-specific, make sure to create a unique approach serving your industry-type. Plan on creating an individual open-ended layout for it to breathe through the changing market and not just to vanish within one particular marketing time-space.

Guest article written by: With a profound experience of more than 13 years in the industry, Ramish Zaidi is currently the Co-founder of the NASSCOM Regional Chapter, CEO of a Startup—Vortex Global Services, and a prominent Investor in more than 18 product companies today.